Now that was an amazing weekend! Yes, I am talking about the Shadowfax ‘Code Wars’ hack. The 24-hour hack was awesome with all the ideas flowing in and not to mention the great food and music. So, a round of applause to all who made it a great hackathon.

Let’s take a look at the cool and creative ideas that came out of this hack. The hackers had to choice of four problem statements to work on. The problem statements were centered around location exchange, monitoring delivery executive behavior, facilitating payments and improving logistical solutions.

Here are the winners and their ideas

Winner: Team The Phoenix

The idea was to get real-time data of delivery executives to manage and optimize most of Shadowfax’s products and services. Their solution was order allocation. To work on the allocation, they computed demand centers (centroid of delivery areas), pickup centers (clusters of pickup points) and rider circles (centroid of the areas the rider travels to). The allocation of riders to demand centers is according to the order volumes in the demand centers. Their algorithm minimizes the sum of the distance between the rider centroid to the pick-up center and from the pick-up center to the demand center.

Special award: Team Amber Blue

They worked to solve the problem of cash on delivery payments by enabling the customers to pay online at the time of delivery via a payment URL. The customer can additionally pinpoint his exact location on a map, to ease the process of navigation for the delivery boy. They assigned credit scores and trust scores to every delivery executive, through a robust delivery executive profiling system, to ensure that cash payments are successfully collected and sent safely to the merchants.

Special award: Dubcoders

This team came up with a solution for three out of the four problem statements provided. They build an android app for riders and a web portal for customers. The apps mainly focus on providing visibility of high order to the riders and also improve the delivery time by providing them the pinpoint location of the customers. Customers can track the riders’ location using the unique link in their SMS. Customers can also ‘Pay Online’ in the rider tracking website if they do not have the required cash.

In addition to these, we held a special fun challenge for the hackers to distract themselves. Remember the spaghetti and marshmallow ice breaker challenge, where you have to build something? Remember how fun it was? Yeah, it is fun, but it’s sort of childish, right? And it really doesn’t let you show off your amazing coding/hacking skills. So, instead of this challenge, we introduced a unique coding challenge. That wou

We gave participants five simple problem statements which were kept open on their dashboards from 6p.m. onwards. These five problem statements revolved around the fundas we studied during our initial programming days. Sounds easy enough.

But there was one interesting twist! Instead of the boring sample input, sample output kind, we challenged the attendees to solve the problems using the smallest number of characters! The choice of language? Completely open.

So now, not only do you have think about how to solve the problem, you had to figure out which language was best. And you had to keep tweaking the code to minimize characters! (I think I’d prefer Python to code in, don’t you think?)

Also, we had leaderboards so that the hackers could see what the mark was to beat. Several hackers got so caught up in this that we fear that we might’ve distracted them!

Anyway, we saw submissions even early in the morning! And at the end, we gave the coders on top of the leaderboard some cool goodies.

So, expect more exciting ice breakers like these from us for the upcoming hacks too. Bye bye to spaghetti and marshmallows! R.I.P. (One minute silence for this old favorite.)

Inspired by all these great ideas? Work on your cool idea by registering with us for the Cloud Hack by DigitalOcean; it’s open for all. Also, if you do want us to resurrect the spaghetti and marshmallows thing, tell us in the comment section below.